Product Description

The elven king is dead. By tradition, a new king is chosen from the elven princes. In their quest for the crown, the princes leave their castles to tour the villages of Elfenland using the unique modes of transportation available in Elfenland. They first visit the villages in their own realms and then travel to the villages in other realms. In each village, the princes receive a few gold coins as tokens of their visit. To thwart their opponents in the quest for the crown, the princes can place thieves and obstacles along the routes. The prince who collects the most gold in his journeys, will be crowned the new king.

Product Reviews

You might be wondering why I say that it is one of the best, when it is so easy to abuse the rules, and break this game? Well if you make some minor rules adjustments, the strategic possibilities of this game are fantastic. Here are the rules tweaks that I would reccomend:

1. After the first turn, deal 8 cards to each player, but have them discard down to a maximum of 10 cards. That way, they get some advantage by keeping cards, but not an undue advantage.

2. Only allow the gold doubling bonus to occur the first time you land on the village.

The first two rules are pretty much necessary, but this third rule is optional:

3. Playing a thief on a village with another players gold card cancels the effect of the gold card instead of giving the player 2 gold for that player. All other players who land there must still give the thief 2 gold.

The fact that you can add and remove villages, buy cards, exchange cards, play obstacles, and thieves, makes for a very challenging and exciting game. Also, the theme of the game, the artwork, and everything else make this game a winner, despite its susceptibility to abuse.

This game plays much better than Elfenland, and has more strategic possibilities. It is also easier to set up and take down.

I write reviews with family game nights in mind. King of the Elves is nearly perfect!

The game is based on the excellent board game Elfenland and is almost like a souped-up, fantasy-themed Mille Bornes. Players play two phases. In the first phase, village cards are played, and obstacles/bonuses are added, making the 'board' the players will travel on. The second phase, players get as far around the 'board' as possible, collecting coins as they go.

This game is fun, unique, and clever (and the artwork is beautiful!) Everyone I have played this game with has loved it and wanted to play again immediately. The game can be a bit edgy (sometimes all the obstacles seem to affect mostly you and no one else; sometimes you can't seem to get the cards you need to travel) but it tends to balance out through the number of rounds played and through special cards like the knight card. And if you hate card games and have to have a board game, pick up the also excellent Elfenland!

King of the Elves

The good: Fun, fast, very inexpensive, high replayability, beautiful artwork. The bad: As with most card games, sometimes the cards just don't fall your way.

This improvement over Alan Moon's award-winning Elfenland (see December 1998 GAMES, now translated by Rio Grande) retains the enchantment of the original but adds more player interaction. Players build villages, featuring six types of terrain, in their own realms. They then finish the round by traveling the land, stopping at each village to earn the gold available there. The player with the most gold wins. You must plan to have the right cards to visit each village: Seven types of transportation are available, but none serves all terrains. The Magic Cloud, for instance, will only carry you to three kinds. A wide variety of Action Cards allows you to steal earnings from others, double your rewards at a city, or lay obstacles that opponents can only surmount by drawing heavily upon their travel resources. Cards played replace Elfenland's inflexible board routes and, with the Actions, make for an even more delightful game of strategy and gratifying meanness.

Stuart Dagger
(Counter Magazine)

January 31, 2000

First there was Elfenroads: a critical success, but also a limited
edition and very much a gamers' game. Not a combination that makes
anyone a lot of money. Then came Elfenland, a shortened and simplified
version of Elfenroads aimed at the broader and much bigger family market.
Get that one right and you do make money, and, as you all know, Elfenland
did get it right. This new one is a third trip to the well, taking the
same idea and redoing it as a card game. There is a long list of Hollywood
films that can be cited as evidence for the proposition that follow-ups
are artistic failures more often than not, but among all the rip-offs
you do get the occasional Godfather II. This game isn't in that sort of
league, but it is also a long way from being a piece of pure exploitation.
The marketing strategy has been to attach it to Elfenland's coat tails and
graphically the two games are very similar, but the mechanics are new.
You still have elves going on journeys but this is most definitely a
different game.

The cards come in three types: travel cards, village cards and action
cards, with the first being the element that has been carried across
from the earlier games. So you have elf cycles, troll wagons, pigs,
dragons, unicorns, clouds and rafts, and each is good on certain types
of terrain and either inefficient or useless on others. In the boardgames
the terrain lay between the villages. That is obviously not possible when
there is no board and so this time the terrain is attached to the villages
themselves. If you wish to visit a mountain village, unicorns or dragons
or clouds are good news; you can get by with elf cycles or troll wagons;
but pigs and rafts are no help at all. If on the other hand the village
lies on a lake or a sea, it is a case of rafts or nothing.

The game consists of a series of rounds in each of which card play
will result in a circuit of villages, with one or two lying in front
of each player. Once this part of the round is complete, each player
will undertake a journey starting from the part of the circuit immediately
in front of them and collecting gold as they go. The player with most
gold at the end of the game will be the winner. Various of the villages
will also have been embellished with action cards, some good some bad.
The good ones will make the journey more profitable for the player who
placed them and the bad ones will make life more difficult for everybody else.
Typical cards include thieves (who rob travellers passing through the village
of some of their gold), logs and sea monsters (which increase travel costs),
gold (which increases the income from the village) and soldiers (who get
you past any bits of nastiness that the opposition has put there). Once
everybody has made their journey, new cards are dealt out, all the ones that
were played in the previous round are removed to the discard pile and the
whole business starts again.

This process of circuit building provides the game with a solid and
interesting core giving everyone plenty to think about. Your aim is
to create a circuit which suits your travel cards but which won't suit
those of your opponents, and the game gives you a good range of tactical
options. You can play village cards not just in front of yourself but
in front of others. Likewise with action cards. Restrictions on the
number of cards played in each area make timing important here and that
is usually a good feature of a game. At a cost of gold you can buy up
to three extra cards and can remove villages and their associated action
cards from the section in front of you. This also brings in considerations
of timing. You can also, at a cost of reducing your hand size, trade
unwanted cards for new ones from the deck.

An interesting core then and since the core is almost equal to the whole,
this ought to make for an interesting game and to a large extent it does.
But there are weaknesses. The first is easily fixed: just don't believe
everything it says on the box. ``2-6 players, playing time 45 minutes''.
Pah! I haven't tried the game with two but think it would lose a lot (though
See Larry below). I have tried it with six. Never again! My group are
not slow players but with this number it still took us over two hours and
for a game of this weight that is way too long. This is something that the
designer and developers should have been aware of, for much the same is
true of Elfenroads. With four players it is an excellent game; with six
it drags interminably. Some of my players refuse to play it under any
circumstances and the reason is that their one experience of it was the
time we tried it with six. If you buy this one, the first thing you should
do after removing the shrink wrap is take a felt tip pen and change that
``2-6'' to ``3-5''. That way you won't forget. I'd also suggest that even
when playing it with five you reduce the number of rounds to four.

The other is more subtle but can probably also be fixed. It concerns
card hoarding. There are a couple of aspects to the game that tend to
make this a good idea. One is a bonus element in the scoring; the other
an interaction between two of the action cards. (I shan't be more
specific than that, because if you don't spot it the problem won't
arise and you'll probably enjoy the game more.). Provided this is not
carried to excess, it is simply a strategic option and for many groups
that is how it will stay. However, if it is carried to excess -- and
there is nothing in the rules to stop it -- the whole game structure
starts to come apart, with the draw deck becoming unacceptably small and
key cards not circulating. This happened in our not to be repeated 6-hander.
If you do run into the problem, try introducing a maximum hand size.
I would suggest 8 as the maximum number of cards that you can carry over
from one round to the next. This is high enough to give players the
option of holding back on the length of their journey this round in
order to score better next but is enough to stop excessively large hands
and to inhibit people who might be temted to sit on key cards in order
to deny others their use.

In summary, I think that this was one of the better games from Essen,
but against that positive statement must be set the fact that I thought Essen
'99 was short on good new games and so the competition wasn't that tough.
A less equivocal recommendation can be built round the flexibility
the game has when you are considering its likely appeal to various groups.
Gamers who thought the SdJ game too light are likely to find this one
much more to their liking, but at the same time it has the potential to
be enjoyed by family groups who would shy away from Elfenroads. This is
one of those games that can be played either hard or fairly friendly.
Normally that would mean ``buy this'', but here it is not that simple for
you also need to decide just how many games you want about elves riding
round on pigs. They have now spent so much time in each other's company
that people are starting to talk. If the
answer is that you only want one, and if you already have Elfenland,
then you might find that the goal of having a game that will appeal to both
keen gamers and fringe gamers could be better achieved by buying the
Elfengold expansion. That is the majority opinion among the views I have read,
but it is by no means unanimous and so it is going to come down to a case
of reading both descriptions and then making your own call.

Other Resources for König der Elfen:

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